AIOps Knowledge: It’s Out There

IT organizations launching their first AIOps initiatives might be surprised to discover how much of a head start they already have in terms of an existing knowledge base. There are elements of that knowledge base in existing IT teams, in vendor experience, and even in the work of their industry peers.

Cloud tech thought leader and Deloitte Chief Cloud Strategy Officer David S. Linthicum highlighted that fact in a recent blog.

Linthicum seemed to paint a picture of AIOps as an always-learning and adapting animal, writing, “While AIOps cannot deliver miracles, it does have the ability to adjust and expand to vastly different operations problem domains. It could become the centralized command-and-control interface. AIOps can also leverage an always-learning brain to automate today’s manual operations tasks, and thus avoid an outage.”

Key AIOps advice

Linthicum went on to share four tips from teams that have implemented AIOps or CloudOps.

His advice included points about integrating AIOps initiatives with other operations efforts, such as SecOps; tying AIOps into ticketing systems to enable “pre-crisis” maintenance; and centralized logging, analysis, and knowledge-based learning.

But it is Linthicum’s fourth tip that may be an angle that doesn’t get enough public attention: “Leverage existing knowledge bases from similar ops domains. Savvy CloudOps subject-matter experts don’t start from scratch with AIOps, but instead bump up their AI power with a pre-populated knowledge base of experiences.”

He said that without an existing knowledge base, the AIOps tool would have to learn what causes a failure and how to spot it. That process can take months. For starters, there likely are knowledge bases already within an organization, such as storage and application performance knowledge bases. So, AIOps or CloudOps teams need to reach out to other internal operations groups that can share experience and data and seed the AIOps knowledge base.

However, there are AIOps knowledge bases beyond the company’s walls, such as those being built up by software vendors, including some that are industry-specific or application focused.

Vendor knowledge

Linthicum expects that AIOps vendors may follow the trends seen with other types of software in the past. Over the years the experiences of major customers led to knowledge bases that could be applied across an industry – for example, retail – or within core applications such as accounting.

He explained, “You should expect the availability of vendor-supplied knowledge bases for huge retailers such as Walmart, Walgreens, and Costco, with their large corporate offices and big IT budgets, before they become available to small wholesalers that supply specialty goods. Work with your vendor, but also get creative in your search for potential knowledge bases for your specific sector.”